Today is the 20th anniversary of the Daimler Chrysler merger

[12,000 RPM]

Auto news had done a great oral history on it. Copious Lutzisms

http://www.autonews.com/article/20180507/FEATURE/180509923/the-culture-clash-heard-round-the-world

[93JC]

Lol, very telling comment from that page:

...did Chrysler folks really believe their 3.2 was equal to Mercedes' engine? From a German perspective, the whole idea of being "tarnished" and all that makes sense, remember the K cars weren't that far off.

Chrysler 3.2 V6, introduced in 1998: SOHC, 4-valves-per-cylinder, 225 hp, 225 lb-ft.
Mercedes-Benz 3.2 V6 (M112.941), introduced in 1998: SOHC, 3-valves-per-cylinder, 215 hp, 229 lb-ft.

The Chrysler engine was every bit the Mercedes's equal. They killed production of it in 2001, after only three years.


Mercedes-Benz quality and reliability was considerably worse than Chrysler's at the time. They were riding on their laurels, and still are.

[r0tor]

Ironically, the best benefits of the marriage for Chrysler probably were realized after the divorce... Chrysler is still enjoying the JGC and sister Durango, they are still selling their recycled rwd platform, and still stuffing the pentastar v6 in everything which was a light year better than the engine it replaced

[Laconian]

Schrempp sounded like a complete prick. A less than ideal situation but he made the worst of it with gusto.

[12,000 RPM]

I'm really dying to know what MB was hoping to and actually got out of this marriage. They didn't want the filth of Chrysler intermixed with their cars' genes, but they pursued the marriage aggressively anyway. Did Schempp just want to bend Eaton over a table in front of a live studio audience? I posited a theory on TCL:

Back to the subject at hand. I had a damn good long ass post about how all the foreign manufacturers were in a bind because of economic/monetary conditions back home. Japan and Germany's currencies soared in the 80s, making their exports here less profitable back home, and Japan was reeling from the stock market collapse they never recovered from. I think those macroeconomic ripples happened in the late 80s/early 90s, but with developmental lead times we didn't see the effects until the mid to late 90s.

- 96 to 97 Camry
- W1xx to W2xx Benz E/S classes
- All the Japanese sports cars shooting up to $80K and getting pulled out of the US market
- VW MK4 era *shudders*

So Daimler was probably desperate to establish some manufacturing base in the US, and rather than build some factories they figured they could strong arm Chrysler and force them into building the cars there. But obviously there was a lot they didn't anticipate or swallow their pride to leverage. They did get that Alabama plant for the MLs but I don't know if that even required the merger to happen.

For regular folks it had no effect on the views of either brand but it did expose how far good product can carry so-so management (in the case of MB).

[veeman]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJklX4PNKWg

Good commercial...